Generous, Kind, Gentle, Decent People: Ministry of Fear

| John Costello |

A four-panel image, three panels showing the same man in black standing next to signs warning "BE ON YOUR GUARD," "DON’T HELP THE ENEMY!" and "Keep it under your hat." The fourth panel shows him holding a knife.

The Ministry of Fear plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, February 9th, through Tuesday, February 11th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.


I want to tell you why almost everyone turns out to be a Nazi collaborator in Ministry of Fear (1944), a wartime thriller set during the London Blitz. I want to tell you who knows they are helping the Nazis, and who acts without understanding they’re part of a larger scheme. I want to tell you these things, but I can’t. The Ministry of Fear doesn’t want me to.

Fear works through doubt, and while I wasn’t afraid of this movie, I recognized how intentionally it deploys doubt.

Although the film offers one entity untouched by conspiracy, perhaps reassuring the viewing public that they can always rely on Scotland Yard to protect them, charity and certainty are otherwise undermined. Even the innocence of the main character and hero, Stephen Neale, seems dubious throughout the film.

A handsome man in a suit having drinks with a well-dressed woman. Behind her back, he's stuck his hand in her purse to search it.

Watching Ray Milland as Stephen work to uncover the Nazi plot and avoid various accusations against him, I wanted to be Stephen’s friend, and I suspected he was lying about his past. After spending two years in an asylum, Stephen ignores his doctor’s recommendation to settle somewhere quiet. Instead, he pursues his desire to be jostled and crowded, putting himself on a path to London with a brief detour at a charity fête near the train station.

Part of Stephen’s appeal is in how the other characters react to him, before and after he reaches London. The stationmaster offers to watch his luggage. At the fête, a benefit organized for the blandly named Mothers of Free Nations, people joke with Stephen and guide him to different attractions where he can spend a shilling. A few people joke about his bachelor status. At one point, one of the conspirators tells him, “You’re most attractive when you’re lying.” Only when people mention marriage or a wife does he quickly become aloof and distant. One of these reactions results in Stephen receiving the correct information to guess the weight of a cake. He stumbles into the conspiracy.

And when he guesses the right information, almost everyone around him freezes, whether from shock or fear. It’s unsettling.

Stephen is told that there was a mistake, that someone else has won the cake. He talks his way around returning the cake, “made with real eggs.” (Now, egg shortages are due to avian flu; back then, food was rationed to support the war effort.) Eventually, the film explains the importance of the cake and why trouble follows Stephen to London in the cake’s wake. He charms more people, including Willie and Carla Wilfe, Austrian siblings who escaped Nazis in Austria and founded the Mothers of Free Nations charity in Britain.

“It’s the way they work all around you, knowing about everybody, everything. That night they hunted us!” Carla reminds her brother when they discover their charity may be a front for a spy ring. Lies and deception advance the plot.

A man chases after a cake thief through a misty fen at night, during a bombing raid. Both men are seen from behind.

If you accept Stephen’s explanation for why he was sentenced to an asylum for the death of his wife, then he’s innocent. “Innocence is like a dumb [mute] leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm,” wrote Graham Greene in a later novel adapted, like his novel Ministry of Fear, into a movie.1 A leper unable to warn others of disease presents a danger to everyone. Innocence, for Greene, threatens to harm everyone because the innocent person doesn’t understand how the world works. Once Stephen innocently takes the cake, he’s attacked and blamed for crimes. His efforts to clear his name also drive the film.

Stephen, wearing a suit and tie, and Carla, wearing a 1940s business suit, lean toward each other across a desk in a study for a kiss

For at least half the movie, Stephen fears having his original crime exposed. Later, he tells Carla he has decided truth is the best policy, and he delivers a version of events blaming the judicial system for needing to sentence him for a crime. He claims he acquired the poison but didn’t administer it to his wife. Stephen, Carla, and the mysterious man in black following Stephen have clear reasons to feel threatened. The other characters are another matter.

Frequently, someone reminds Stephen about the threat of Nazi bombardment. Villagers warn children about the pending blackout, and a farmer complains about “the nozzies” constantly flying bombing raids over his farm. Bombers drone overhead during the train ride to London. Blackout curtains cover every window at night and often during daytime, increasing the film’s vibe of imprisonment. Stephen and Carla spend a night in a London Underground station during one Nazi bombardment. (Spoiler: A little girl and her basket of kittens survive this particular bombardment, and apparently the entire film.)

The film abounds with characters who present themselves as gentle and decent, carrying on in the face of adversity. Deception, anxiety, uncertainty, and fear seem reasonable given the circumstances. The bombings explain a lot of the anxiety, but not why all these people are involved in a conspiracy. Nothing about the conspiracy suggests that a halt to the bombings is likely. Eventually, the conspiracy might enable a Nazi invasion, and that seems like a worse option.

“My instructions are these,” says one of the fortune tellers, indicating she is part of the plot. When Stephen wins the cake, the expressions on the villagers’ faces, including the Vicar’s, suggest they also know the truth and have been frightened into silence. Two people choose death for the sake of the conspiracy.

In London, Stephen works against the machinations of another cell of conspirators. These are artists, doctors, shopkeepers, government employees, charity volunteers, villagers, and farmers, people who lack power and people who possess power. By the end of the film, everyone seems like a secret Nazi, except the cops and Stephen.

A triptych composed of three stills. In the first, three people walk through a bookstore past a display of books with Swastikas on the back. In the second, Stephen turns to examine the books. The third still reveals that the book is "The Psychoanalysis of Nazis" by Dr. J. M. Forrester, another character in the film

“People do such things on the pain of necessity,” one of the Nazis explains late in the film. The conspiracy works because too many people have been co-opted, whether through blackmail or intimidation. If you don’t tell someone why the cake is important, only that it is important, it becomes hard for them to report suspicions about the cake. Intimidate them a little, suggesting that the bombers might redirect from the munitions factory to their farm and village, bombing them and their families out of existence. Threaten to use some shame against them, such as the theft of eggs. Do them some favor, making them guilty by association if the truth about your organization is revealed. Try to eliminate them when they learn too much, as the Nazis decide to do with Stephen.

In the end, more than Stephen’s innocence gives him a chance in fighting against the police’s belief that he is crazy and the Nazi attempts to destroy him and Britain. He speaks out. The charity of others toward him and a shared cause, stopping Nazis, proves invaluable.

A smiling man wearing a suit and hat holds a cake box, foiling the attempt of two women wearing dresses and hats who tried to take back the cake.

Footnotes

1 The quote, attributed to the novel The Quiet American, is part of a larger quote calling for us to protect ourselves from innocence. I first heard a slightly modified version of this phrase attributed to Carol Reed, director of the film adaptation of another Greene novel, The Third Man (1949). A memorable example of medieval lepers jangling warning bells can be found in the film Anchoress (1993).


Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon

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